This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Houston Public Media. Leisa Glenn spent decades living in the Fifth Ward, a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, known for having one of the city’s best views of downtown. Every July 4th, Glenn, 65, and her neighbors would stream out of their houses into the summer heat and crowd onto front porches to watch the fireworks display. She remembers the smell of the barbeque pit charring hot dogs and how neighbors would gather on every surface outside to watch: on top of cars, in folding chairs, and on porch steps. “To look at the skyline at night, downtown, every night in different colors, and when they light it up — it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” said Glenn. Over the years, however, this crowd got smaller and smaller. Neighbors fell sick. Others moved away.
In Houston’s historically Black neighborhood known as the Fifth Ward, homes sit across from the former Southern Pacific rail yard. Buried beneath the Fifth Ward and its neighboring community, Kashmere Gardens, is an expansive toxic plume of creosote derived from coal tar. Historically, creosote has been used in the United States to preserve wood such as railroad ties and utility poles; it has also been linked to health issues such as lung irritation, stomach pain, rashes, liver and kidney problems, and even cancer, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the Environmental Protection Agency. Glenn remembers the old Houston Wood Preserving Works plant in the neighborhood that sat adjacent to the Englewood rail yard, which is the biggest rail yard in the city and one of the largest in the Union Pacific system. For decades, its creosote was ever-present in the community: Strong odors permeated the neighborhood. Kids swam in a lagoon filled with waste from the factory. And when it rained, a rainbow oil slick would coat the streets. While the actual facility is long gone, shut down in 1984, the creosote plume it created persists. The site is currently owned by Union Pacific Railroad, which acquired it in a merger with the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1990s.
Glenn can clearly recall when the cancer cases started. It was the early 1990s, and the first person on her street to get sick was Carolyn, only 35 when she died, according to Glenn. “So it really started at the corner with Carolyn,” she said. As more people started getting sick, “it just started trickling down the street.” When Glenn talks about the people who have passed away, she mentions there’s not enough time for her to name all of them. But she starts ticking off people on the list: Mr. CL, Ms. Osborn, Mr. Johnny, Ms. Barbara Beale, her former friend and collaborator, and, of course, her mother Lucille. Finally, in her late 30s, Glenn left after dealing with ongoing stomach issues for years. She often experienced a combination of coughing and pain that would get so bad she would throw up. Sometimes she coughed up blood. To this day, she has to take medication. In 2019, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services established three separate cancer clusters in the Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens. A 2021 report from the Texas Department of State Health Services established one childhood leukemia cluster, confirming what residents had been saying for years.
When it comes to creosote, “this was a very, very high exposure area,” said Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department. “We know that exposure to these chemicals causes these cancers,” she told Grist. She also noted that in cancer cluster studies, the only types of cancers investigated were ones known to be caused by creosote and other cancer-causing chemicals found at the Union Pacific Railroad site. It’s hard to flesh out what illnesses are caused by past exposure to creosote from when the facility was open versus current exposure to the plume lurking beneath residents’ feet. The U.S. EPA is currently conducting comprehensive testing in conjunction with Union Pacific to understand these competing timelines and exposure risks. Testing could take up to a year to complete.
Last July, after years of pleas from residents and several scientific and public health studies, Houston’s City Council announced a plan to relocate residents. In September, it approved $5 million to help residents move away from the contamination. Then-Mayor Sylvester Turner celebrated the funding, but warned it needed to be just the beginning: His office estimated relocating all 110 lots on the plume would cost about $24 million. As of last summer, 10 families have signed up for the buyout plan. Last month, Houston’s new mayor, John Whitmire, allocated the first $2 million of those funds to Houston’s Land Bank to begin relocations.
There is a long history in the United States of companies paying to relocate residents rather than cleaning up polluted communities, from Diamond, Louisiana to Detroit, Michigan. But it is a rarer case when a city steps in to remediate this company-caused harm. Public health and environmental justice experts told Grist that Houston may be one of the first major cities in the United States to facilitate residential buyouts not on the basis of a climate disaster, but because of pollution. After years of residents in the area trying to get Union Pacific to come to the table to discuss remediating the area, the city took an unprecedented step of offering the voluntary buyouts to residents on its own dime.
That response “feels unique and somewhat novel, in the history of U.S. environmental justice movements,” said Manann Donoghoe, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institute. He also lauded how quickly the city seemed to acknowledge and act once the cancer clusters were established. “What’s most interesting for me, as somebody who writes about climate reparations, was to see the city’s response,” he said. “To see immediately the mayor coming out and saying that, ‘Yes, this is an injustice, this is something that should be addressed.’” But with city money involved, concerns are being raised by members of IMPACT, a local group that advocates for the people who live near the creosote plume, about what will happen to the land once residents are relocated. Further complicating the issue is that no one is sure about the risk.
When current Fifth Ward resident Mary Hutchins, 61, looks around her neighborhood, it’s clear that things are changing. Streets have been resurfaced and there’s a new, massive residential and retail complex that opened last year in Fifth Ward, which includes a sprawling apartment complex with 360 units, nearly 250,000 square feet of office space, and over 100,000 square feet of retail, according to the Houston Chronicle. Hutchins is concerned that just as plans have solidified for residents to relocate, this development could price the original homeowners out of the area — meaning that any future cleanups would only benefit newer residents.
“So people who once lived in this neighborhood, they could never come back here, never. Because they can’t afford it,” Hutchins said. “Now it’s like they’re building all around us — everything is up-and-coming.” At a recent city council meeting, Steven David, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Whitmire, presented new research that confirmed what Hutchins had observed: Since 2019, the city has issued 88 permits for new construction of single-family homes and 17 permits for new multi-family homes. Another concerning development is that the incoming residents weren’t warned about the cancer cluster. In response, Mayor Whitmire put a pause on development in the Fifth Ward. He also thinks the bill for cleanup should be…
